Bakersfield

Abstract

Bakersfield Tracy Daugherty (bio) The longest oil pipeline in the United States runs from Kern County, California, where thousands of hungry Okies decamped in the ’30s seeking redemption, to my home desert in West Texas where, when I was a child, no shelter could spare you from the dust in the air, no meals came without slabs of fatty meat, and the only redemption possible, if you believed the Holy Rollers, was loud, fast, and painful. My Okie parents, who’d followed the smell of oil to Texas’s tumbleweed flats, cursed the dust, scarfed the meat, and feared the wrath of God. That’s life in Kern County even now. Though I’ve never been here before, this is home, as surely as if the All-American Pipeline pumped values, manners, and taste in tons of raw crude through its , 1 223-mile artery. At full production the pipeline carries 300,000 barrels of oil a day. It was built in the mid-’80s at a cost of $1.4 billion and is operated now by a Houston-based company whose biggest storage facility sprawls across the grassy plains of Oklahoma. Fifty years earlier another artery linked the folks of Texas, Oklahoma, and California. Route 66 bore tons of tacky bedding, overalls and faded print dresses, jalopies shedding parts like pelts, across the deserts and the mountains and into the hard-labor towns of the West. Kern County, rich in crops and oil, became Little Oklahoma. By the late ’30s, plains migrants had swelled the county’s population by over sixty percent. They dug in, stubbornly, picking cotton, pumping oil, plucking grapes. They built shelters out of strawberry crates, cardboard boxes, old tin cans. They cursed the dust and raised their kids to fear the wrath of God. That’s why, today, walking the back streets of Bakersfield, passing a barbershop and hearing the nasal twangs of fellows being buzz-cut, I’m [End Page 11] home, though I’m a first-timer here. There’s a lilt of the gospel and the swing of country music in their talk. An old joke still makes the rounds here: “What are the first words an Okie kid learns? Mama, Papa, and Bakersfield.” A few miles north, moseying down an unpaved block of McCord Street in Oildale, Merle Haggard’s childhood home, I glimpse skinny boys in front of rusty trailers. Instantly I know I’m among the children and grandchildren of Okies. Once crate and cardboard hovels trembled in the wind here. I’ve found where I might have lived if my grandfather hadn’t stuck it out in Oklahoma at the height of the Dust Bowl drought; where I might have grown up if my father, an oil man all his life, had been transferred here from Texas. I’ve come to the end of the road, the source of the pipeline, three years after the Oklahoma City bombing—another brutal scattering of folks like my own—to see what might have been and to witness what remains. “I’ll be everywhere,” Tom Joad said, “wherever you can look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready.” Lately I’ve seen him in dreams standing by the house where I was born, by the banks of the Kern, by the fence around the Murrah site. Today, in Oildale, in the Happy Acres Trailer Park, a man in jeans and a white T-shirt stands on a wooden stoop in front of his tiny mobile home scratching his belly. He squints at the haze in the air, a fume of valley dust and refinery steam. He’s middle-aged, tired. Querulous and slow. He appears to be confused about something. He drops his gaze, sees me, and nods, both wary and open, noting my strangeness as well as my dim familiarity. I nod back. I might be looking at myself. Later, I stop at a barbershop called “Oakie Ray’s” near the Bakersfield airport...